It’s been a long time. A very long time. I joined Flickr back in 2005 and posted my first photos via email from my camera phone. (Three years before anyone had any kind of inkling of the smartphone.) Getting to know other people through the photo sharing service gave me a group of friends, which essentially kept me in Switzerland, which then led to Jo moving to be with me a couple of years later.

All things come to an end, though. All but the hardiest people have long-since stopped sharing photos online, or have moved to Facebook or Instagram. This means that all the reasons I had to be on Flickr have dried up. The announcement that Flickr is to delete swathes of photos from non-pro accounts and upping the annual cost for a pro account means that I’m done.

What that means? 8,200 photos to be deleted from the service. All the comments: gone. All of the photos I embedded into my own website… well, I couldn’t very well destroy thirteen years’ hard work. So I spent time at the end of last year migrating all of the photos to my own website and ensuring that, alongside the photos, all of the keywords and groupings of images are still there.

This means that—after I culled some of the unnecessary entries—I or my site visitors can browse through the entire archives here at permanenttourist.ch. I’m going to work on the site this year to improve navigation; after all, no-one wants to click through 8,000 photos manually. That’ll be a nice technical challenge in itself, which will help me build tech. and knowledge from which the clients at our web agency will profit.